A bumper crop of urban corn

One area of downtown Los Angeles looks a bit like rural Kansas these days, with a 32-acre cornfield growing in the shadow of skyscrapers. The patch of green is the work of Los Angeles sculptor and conceptual artist Lauren Bon, who converted a disused rail yard into a temporary earthwork intended to symbolize the downtown area's social and cultural regeneration.

Located at North Spring Street near Chinatown, just south of the Los Angeles River, the project, ironically titled Not a Cornfield, recalls Agnes Denes's 1982 Wheatfield--A Confrontation, which featured two acres of cultivated land in the Battery Park City landfill in Lower Manhattan. However, in contrast with Denes's solidly planted lot, Bon's cornfield includes a spiraling pathway leading from the street to the center of the field where a large, circular clearing accommodates music and other types of performances. As part of the endeavor, Bon will coordinate this month and next the hand-harvesting of the cornfield's approximately 2 million ears. She plans to create an installation with the drying ears that will be on display in a nearby warehouse for six months.

In addition, Bon's work alludes to the area's history. The site is the last recorded location of Yang-na, a large Native-American settlement that thrived before the Spanish established the Los Angeles pueblo in 1781. Corn was central to daily life there until 1828, when the Indians, who had inhabited the area since around 500 A.D., were evicted from the land and dispersed.

In recent years, the rail yard was used for grain shipments to a nearby milling company. Seeds that spilled from hopper cars resulted in cornstalks sprouting all along the tracks, giving the area its nickname, "the Cornfield."

The area received state park status a decade ago but remained derelict until Bon's proposal was accepted by the city council and parks department early this year, after some opposition and controversy. A number of observers have taken issue with the fact that Bon is an Annenberg heiress and a trustee of the Annenberg Foundation, which is funding the $2-million project. The foundation, however, is known for its support of large-scale earthworks; last year, for example, it gave the Dia Foundation for the Arts $1.5 million in support of James Turrell's Roden Crater project in Arizona.

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